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The Philosophy of the Present

Chapter 3 The Social Nature of the Present

The social nature of the present arises out of its emergence. I am referring to the
process of readjustment that emergence involves. Nature takes on new characters, for
example with the appearance of life, or the stellar system takes on new characters with
the loss of mass by the collapse of atoms through the processes that go on within a star.
There is an adjustment to this new situation. The new objects enter into relationship with
the old. The determining conditions of passage set the conditions under which they
survive, and the old objects enter into new relations with what has arisen. I am here
using the term "social" with reference not to the new system, but to the process
of readjustment. An outstanding illustration is found in ecology. There is an answer in
the community in the meadow or the forest to the entrance of any new form, if that form
can survive. When the new form has established its citizenship the botanist can exhibit
the mutual adjustments that have taken place. The world has become a different world
because of the advent, but to identify sociality with this result is to identify it with
system merely. It is rather the stage betwixt and between the old system and the new that
I am referring to. If emergence is a feature of reality this phase of adjustment, which
comes between the ordered universe before the emergent has arisen and that after it has
come to terms with the newcomer, must be a feature also of reality. It can be illustrated
in the appearance of a planet upon the hypothetical approach of the stellar visitor that
occasioned the origin of our planetary system. There was a period at which the substance
of our

(48) own earth was part of the sun's revolving outer sheath. Now it is a body separated
from the stellar mass, still revolving, but in its own orbit. The fact that the planet is
exhibiting the same momentum in its distant orbit as that which carried it about the star
before its advent as a planet, does not do away with the fact that there is now a
planetary system where here was formerly only a single stellar body, nor with that stage
in which the substance of the planet to be was in both systems. Now what we are accustomed
to call social is only a so-called consciousness of such a process, but the process is not
identical with the consciousness of it, for that is an awareness of the situation. The
social situation must be there if there is to be consciousness of it.

Now it is clear that such a social character can belong only to the moment at which
emergence takes place, that is to a present. We may in ideation recall the process, but
such a past is not a reintegration of the affair as it went on, for it is undertaken from
the standpoint of the present emergence, and is frankly hypothetical. It is the past that
our present calls for, and it is tested by its fitting into that situation. If, per
impossible, we were to reach that past event as it took place we should have to be in
that event, and then compare it with what we now present as its history. This is not only
a contradiction in terms, but it also belies the function of the past in experience. This
function is a continual reconstruction as a chronicle to serve the purposes of present
interpretation. We seem to approach this complete recall, if I may use this expression, in
identifying the fundamental laws of nature, such as those of motion, which we say must
have been and must always be what they are now; and it is here that relativity is most
illuminating. It frankly reduces the sort of reality that could be the identical content
of past, present and future to an ordered arrangement of events in a space-time that, by
definition, could be

(49) as little in any past of scientific imagination as it could be found in our
perceptual world. The geometry of space-time denies emergence unless it is brought in by
way of Whitehead's metaphysics; and if I am not mistaken such a view must surrender the
ordered geometry of space-time that Whitehead retains. Without emergence there are no
distinguishable events thanks to which time emerges. The events and intervals to which the
relativist refers are the constants that shake out of the elaborate mathematics which the
realization of the social character of the universe has shown to be necessary.

The social character of the universe we find in the situation in which the novel event
is in both the old order and the new which its advent heralds. Sociality is the capacity
of being several things at once. The animal traverses the ground in pursuit of his prey,
and is at once a part of the system of distribution of energies which makes his locomotion
possible and a part of the jungle system which is a part of the life system on the surface
of the inanimate globe. Now we recognize that if we are to estimate the energy of
locomotion that he is going to expend we must take into account his ferocity, his state of
hunger and the attraction or fear that his prey excites within him, and equally we
recognize that if we are to estimate these characteristics of the form we must be able to
measure the energy-expressions in his organism and in the environment. There is as genuine
a sociality in his relation to his environment as in his relation to the prey or to his
mate or to his pack, and the mark of it is that we habitually estimate characteristics
that belong to the object as a member of one system by those which belong to it in
another. So we measure motion by the distances covered in the consentient set at rest, or
the dimensions of that set by the motions involved in measurement. The relativist
discovered that this mutual estimation

(50) involved a change in the units of measurement, and that a transformation must be
made if ideal exactness is to be attained. We Seem to be in the same situation in biology.
Accurately to estimate the living process in energy distributions we should be able to
transform inorganic physico-chemical process into organic process, which unfortunately we
have not been able to do.

If we examine the bases of this estimation from one system to another we find two
characteristics, one is the emergence of the event from the conditions under which it has
appeared -- that which, as we have seen, gives rise to its history and may be brought
under the general term of evolution. The second is the carrying on of identical conditions
from the past into the present. The appearances of the planets, when related to the laws
of mass and motion, fall into an ordered series, and from this standpoint the object is
looked at as arising out of the old. From the standpoint of its emergence it is considered
as in both systems, but only in so far common laws obtain in each. The substance of the
arising planet is a piece of the sun, moving with the momentum which belongs to it in that
capacity, and it is also an object in a system within which the sun has a definite mass
that follows from the mass and motion of the planet with reference to the sun. In a
similar fashion in Galilean dynamics accelerations and decelerations were emergents in a
field of motion of masses in an absolute space.

It remained for relativity to set up motion itself as an entity which arises under
certain conditions-those of frames of reference---out of logically antecedent conditions
of events at intervals from each other within space-time. But these conditions no longer
lie within the range of possible experience. It remains true however that what is motion
from one standpoint within experience is rest from another. The relativity of motion had
long been recognized. With the sur-

(51) -render of absolute space and the successful development of Einstein's general
relativity, the emergence of motion and rest out of the more abstract situation that
expresses what is common to both frames of reference or perspectives and appears in one as
motion and in the other as rest, seems to be logically demanded. And yet, as I have just
indicated, such a formulation takes us outside the scheme of development I have sketched
above. It involves the relation of appearance and reality, of the subjective and the
objectively real, not the relation of an emergent object arising out of the past to that
which conditions it. We appear to have left an evolutionary philosophy of science and to
be passing into a rationalistic phase in which reality is offered to us only in patterns
of logic and mathematics. I suspect however that we are much too close to the great
changes which have taken place within the last fifty years to be able to get them into
their proper perspective.

I wish to suggest that the social character of the present offers another standpoint
from which to regard this situation. I have spoken of the social implications of the
emergent present as offered in the occupation by the new object of the old system and the
new, sociality as given in immediate relation of the past and present. There is another
aspect of sociality, that which is exhibited in the systematic character of the passing
present. As we have seen, in the passage from the past into the future the present object
is both the old and the new, and this holds for its relations to all other members of the
system to which it belongs. Before the approach to our sun of the stellar visitor, the
portion of the sun which became the earth was determined in its character by its
relationships to those portions of the sun's substance which became the other planets. As
it is drawn out into its planetary position it retains this character which arises from
the former configuration and assumes the new character

(52) which is expressed in the perturbations of its orbit through the influences of its
neighbors. The point is that a body belonging to a system, and having its nature
determined by its relations to members of that system, when it passes into a new
systematic order will carry over into its process of readjustment in the new system
something of the nature of all members of the old. So in the history of a community, the
members carry over from an old order their characters as determined by social relations
into the readjustments of social change. The old system is found in each member and in a
revolution becomes the structure upon which the new order is established. So Rousseau had
to find both sovereign and subject in the citizen, and Kant had to find both the giver of
the moral law and subject of the law in the rational being. To revert to the evolution of
the planetary system, the earth's orbit still maps out the central sun of which it was a
part, and its relative motions with reference to other members of the planetary system
reflect their positions in the sun before the stellar visitor arrived.

I have referred to the increase in mass of a moving object as an extreme example of
sociality. That is, if we keep this increase in mass within the field of possible
experience, we have to treat the moving body as in two different systems, for the moving
object has its own time and space and mass due to its motion, which time, space and mass
are different from those of the system relative to which it is moving. The paradoxes
arising out of this occupation of a different system on the part of a moving body are
familiar. What I wish to point out is that we reach here the extreme limit of this
sociality, for every body, thanks to its velocity, has a certain space-time and energy
system. This velocity is, however, relative to the system within which the body is moving,
and the body would have another velocity relative to another system moving with reference
to the first. The body

(53) would then have an indefinite number of measurements of mass in the indefinite
number of systems with reference to which it can be conceived of as moving. It is
occupying all these different systems.

Now we may set up a metaphysical space-time, with its coincidences of events and its
intervals, as the reality to which these frames of reference refer, or we may keep within
the field of experience and use the transformation formulae which have been shown to be
necessary for exact measurement. The question arises as to just what is involved in the
use of the transformation formulae. In the immediate situations within which the
relativity of motion is present in experience, such as the possibility of one's own train
being in motion while the neighboring train is at rest, no transformation is required. In
such cases we cover up the difference in time systems by saying that the differences in
spatial and temporal dimensions are so impossibly small that they cannot be brought into
application, that it is only when we reach velocities which approach that of light that
appreciable differences arise and call for recognition. This is covering up a matter of
fundamental importance. When a train is passing us it is in our own world of space and
time. If we should take the relativistic standpoint and regard the train as at rest and
the earth as rushing by it, we should indeed be passing from one perspective to another,
but then the train would not be moving, and in the present case the train is moving. When
we calculate the change in spatial, temporal and mass characters of an alpha particle
which is shot out of an atom, we are treating it, of course, as in another space-time than
our own, for we are giving to it the dimensions that belong to its space-time including
the change in mass character. Now from the standpoint of Newtonian relativity two
space-time systems are alternatives, they cannot both be applied to the same situation,
except alternatively. But when we

(54) use the Lorentz transformation formula, we are giving the body the characteristics
which belong to another space-time system and using the result in our own. This is
confessed when the statement is simply made that a body increases its mass with its
velocity, and we fail to add that the units of spatial and temporal measurement change
also, that is, that we are in another frame of reference which is alternative to our own
and cannot be simultaneously applied. We are told, however, that if an aeroplane were
passing us at 161,000 miles a second we should see the foreshortening and the slowing down
of the temporal extension of processes, that is, we should see in our own space-time
system the effects of being in the other space-time system.[1] That is,
the two frames of reference cease to be alternatives. In the case of the Fitzgerald
foreshortening, there was no such assumption of being in both systems at once, but in this
case there was no reference to difference in simultaneities.

Now Einstein undertakes to give the procedure by means of which we can be thus in one
space-time system and record in it the effects of the differences due to the alternative
space-time system. This procedure assumes first of all the uniform velocity of light as a
fact in nature. In the second place on the basis of this uniform velocity of light a
signal system is set up by which we can establish in our system that the same events are
not simultaneous in the system that is moving with reference to ours as are simultaneous
in our own. Furthermore, the effect of this difference can be made evident, as in the case
of the passing aeroplane, through vision, that is, through light. What this amounts to is
that as spatial perspectives arise for us in our static landscape, so there are discovered
to be temporal perspectives over against moving

(55) objects in the landscape. This perspective character of a temporal sort is
discoverable only over against motions of very great velocities, but the principle of them
is as definitely given as in the case of the spatial perspectives. That principle is that
dimensions as revealed by measurement must be foreshortened in the direction of the
motion, provided this takes place in a visual field. If the velocity of light were
infinite there would be no foreshortening, for then the light wave that left one end of an
object would reach us at the same moment as the light wave from the other end, no matter
how rapid the motion. It is then only when velocities approach that of light that such a
perspective enters into experience, and then only indirectly as in the calculation of the
change in mass of the particle shot out of the atom. But if we could see what is found in
Eddington's suppositious airplane we should get the visual temporal perspective directly,
for of course time slows down in proportion as spatial dimensions are foreshortened. The
natural assumption would be that these temporal perspectives are to be regarded in the
same light as are spatial perspectives. The real dimensions and the real temporal passage
are what the passengers in the airplane find them to be, just as their distorted view of
us is to be corrected by what we find to be about us and what we find to be going on about
us.

It is at this point that the Larmor-Lorentz transformations and the negative results of
the Michelson-Morley experiment enter. These transformations were worked out to indicate
the mathematically stated conditions under which the Maxwell equations for
electro-magnetism would be invariant. The Newtonian equations are invariant within the
field of Newtonian mechanics. That is, they hold whatever center of origin is taken as the
center of reference and, in the case of the relative motion of systems with uniform
velocity, whichever system is regarded as moving. It was

(56) found that to obtain invariance for the Maxwell equations it was necessary to
affect the symbols referring to space, time and energy, including mass, with a coefficient
1/c in which c is the uniform velocity in a vacuum of the electromagnetic wave, of which
light is one form. The changes in spatial and temporal dimensions which this formula of
transformation demands are those which the temporal perspectives, to which I have referred
above, call for, and there is the same assumption of an absolute value for the velocity of
light. Furthermore this transformation formula gives just the foreshortening of the
earth's diameter in the direction of its motion in its orbit that accounts for the
negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Apart from the striking coincidence in the results reached by means of the
transformation formulae, Einstein's theory of relativity, and the result of the
Michelson-Morley experiment, the outstanding fact is the common assumption of a constant
velocity of light. In the case of the transformation formulae it is not surprising that
the constant should be sought in so fundamental a character as the velocity of the
electro-magnetic wave. In the case of relativity the possibility of measurement by
light-signals in different time-space systems presupposes the uniformity of the velocity
of light, and this is the explanation of the negative result in the Michelson-Morley
experiment. "It means," I quote from Whitehead, "that waves or other
influences advancing with velocity c as referred to the space of any consentient set of
the Newtonian group will also advance with the same velocity c as referred to the space of
any other such set."[2]

There should be added to the account of this conjunction the sweep of the atom out of
the realm of mass mechanics into that of electro-magnetism, and the expression of energy

(57) distribution in terms of fields. The importance of these changes lies in the
change of reference of reality as between distance and contact experience. Formerly, there
was a close correlation between mass mechanics and perceptual reality. The reality of what
we saw was to be found in what we could get under our hands, and what we got under our
hands accorded in imagination with mass as the quantity of matter. But the still more
important point was that we felt the reality to lie in the volume itself in abstraction
from its relations , that the reality of the thing could be there in advance of the system
into which it entered. All the varieties of what I have called spatial perspectives of the
same objects refer to identical objects found in the field of contact experience -- of
what we feel and see simultaneously-and this holds not only for our own perspectives but
also for those of others. It finds its exact expression in congruence. What I have termed
temporal perspectives do not occur in experience, except in such highly imaginative
presentations as Eddington's airplane. But in perspectives which involve differences in
simultaneities we seem to pass beyond the range of their perceptual resolution in the
field of contact experience. We are compelled to bring them into accord by
transformations. And this is just the situation which obtains in respect of the invariance
of the Maxwell equations. The world from the standpoints of different space-time systems,
with different values for the common units of space, time and energy, can only be
assimilated by transformations. There is as close a parallelism between an
electro-magnetic universe and the world of distance experience, that of visions, as
between the world of mass mechanics and our contact experience.

However, there is a break in this complete correlation. As I have already indicated,
the increase in mass of a moving body takes place in the space-time system within which

(58) it is moving, but the calculation of that increase in mass takes place by means of
spatial and temporal units which belong to another space-time system, while the increase
in mass is measured in the space-time system within which the motion is taking place. We
actually find in measurement of our own pointer readings, with our own simultaneities,
that the mass of the alpha particle has increased. We could discover that increase in mass
without any use of the apparatus of relativity, but we account for it by a theory which
implies that a clock on the alpha particle will be running slower than our clock, and it
is by a calculation that involves the time of the alpha particle that we reach the change
in mass which we discover in our own time system. In other words, the correlation breaks
down at the point at which it is brought to the test of an experimental finding, which
must have a reality of its own or it could not test the hypothesis. We must be able to
state the facts involved in our own apparatus, clocks, electrometers in terms which are
independent of the Lorentz transformations and the Einsteinian relativity. And in this
world of final adjudication of the apparatus, the building that contains it and the ground
on which it stands and its surroundings, the ultimate reality is not what belongs to
distance experience, but to what can be presented in the contact experience which this
distance experience promises or threatens. If we are not to go back of the field of
experience into a metaphysical world of Minkowski space-time, with its events and
intervals, we must come back to the perceptual world of scientific findings.

Let me state the situation again. The changes that take place in the field of
electro-magnetism cannot be stated in a set of equations that are invariant for space and
time. It is necessary to assume a different spatio-temporal structure in the field in
which the change is going on. The clocks are going slower and diameters of things in the
direction of the

(59) motion are decreased, while the mass is increased. These are changes which
theoretically are all registered in the field which is at rest and within which the motion
is taking place. But the calculation of them implies a spatio-temporal ordering which does
not belong to that field. It implies another center of reference. The perceptual reality
to which these changes in the field of distance experience refer differs according as they
are taken from the standpoint of one field of reference or from another. This brings out
the other striking character of the situation, that things whose substance belongs to the
field of electro-magnetism cannot be defined in terms that allow of their being isolated
as perceptual findings. For such definition it is necessary that a reality can be
recognized in the thing that can be given in the spatio-temporal features of the
perception-in pointer readings for example. This is the characteristic of mass, as I have
insisted. Though we can define mass only in terms of a system of bodies in motion with
reference to each other, we can think of the substance of the massive thing as found
within the volume which we see or imagine, and can then put it actually or in imagination
into relation with other things. Electricity as the substance of an electron can only be
thought of in terms of its field and of the relations of that field with the fields of
other electrons. Faraday's tubes of force and ether as a stuff have been used for the
purpose of providing such an independent content, and have disappeared within our fingers.
The fact is that science has come back to a structure of things that can be stated only in
terms of distant experience so far as perception is concerned. This offers no difficulty
in the structure of our theories. We know the amount of energy in a system and we can
allocate it to the different members of that system, which can be located in space and
time; but we cannot, so to speak, take a separate element in our fingers and say

(60) of it that this has a certain amount of energy within it which constitutes the
"what it is" of the object, and then relate it to other things with like
contents. Energy is conceivable only in terms of a system that is already there for the
thought that deals with the thing. For the purposes of scientific method, the importance
of contact experience does not lie in the greater reality of tactual or resistance
experience over that of color or of sound, but in the fact that observation and experiment
do come back to distance experience which must be itself directly or indirectly referred
to what we can actually or conceivably get our hands upon. This remains the test of the
reality of the perception, and is therefore the test of the scientist's finding in
observation and experiment, and it is the condition of holding on to the fact as real in
itself in independence of the varied hypotheses that are set up to account for it.

It has been customary to find the reality of the perception in the experience of the
individual, and there have arisen all the multiform difficulties in placing this
individual experience in the reality of the world to which he belongs, especially when
such experience is used to criticize theories about that world. The scientist has been
satisfied to find the same spatial and temporal structure in the individual's experience
that he finds in the world, and thus to locate the individual's observations within the
surrounding world, with all the exactness which spatio-temporal measurement makes
possible. Now relativity, with the electro-magnetic theory out of which it has so largely
arisen, has not only vastly complicated the spatio-temporal theory of measurement, but it
has also reversed what I may call the reality-reference. Instead of saying that the
reality of the perspectives of our distance experience is to be found in that contact
experience which is firmly bedded in the geometry of a Euclidean space and the even flow
of a uniform time, we must say that it is

(60) only as we can read over this seemingly Euclidean space of our contact world into
perspectives dependent upon the motion of distance objects and discover transformation
formulae between these that we can reach the reality of what we perceive. Furthermore we
cannot proceed as we prefer to proceed, with perceptual models, and build up, say, a Bohr
atom out of a number of protons and electrons welded into a nucleus around which we can
set other electrons in planetary revolutions. The positive and negative electricity which
we use as the stuff of these ultimate particles does not submit to such imaginative
perceptual analysis. We may talk about the diameter of an electron or seek to locate its
electrical charge, but the substantial character of electricity cannot be thus isolated,
and the Bohr atom has broken down. In recent speculation it has been found convenient to
deal with matter as a form of vibration, but there is no meaning in seeking for that which
vibrates.

And yet the dependence of scientific theory upon perceptual findings was never more
pronounced, and it is to this dependence that I would direct attention. As I have
indicated the alternative seems to be a reference to a metaphysical world that can only be
assumed, together with the assumption that the logical patterns which we find in our own
world have correlates in this metaphysical world. In the meantime our experience becomes
subjective except in so far as our thought relations may be guessed to transcend our
frames of reference. In the pre-relativity days the spatial and temporal structure of the
observed fact was that of the universe. However relative to the observer the sense
qualities of the observed object might be, its perceptual definition in space and time
gave it fixed contour and location within the relational structure which for the scientist
at least was the absolute structure of the world, and in mass mechanics the substantial
content of any volume could be

(62) thought of as residing within that defined volume. Perception gave both the
logical structure of reality and the defined habitat of substance. The earlier theory of
gases and of heat as a form of motion is outstanding illustration of the simplicity of
this situation. Now neither the relational structure of reality nor the locus of its
substance is to be found in the perceptual situation. But since the scientist can never
reach the metaphysical space-time with its events and intervals except by an assumption,
and since he can never grasp the entire field of any energy content, he is obliged to test
his hypotheses by placing himself both in his own perceptual situation of, say, a system
at rest and also in that of the system which moves with reference to his own, and to
compare the spatio-temporal structures of the two systems. He proceeds by transformations,
but they are transformations which are possible only as the observer grasps that in his
own situation which involves his placing himself in the situation of that which he
observes. Although this is more complicated, it comes back in its findings to perceptual
occasions. Now this is only possible if that sociality of thought in which we occupy the
attitude of the other by taking our own divergent attitude is also a characteristic of
nature. Newtonian relativity permitted the observer to transfer himself from one
system to the other and to note that the relative positions of bodies in the two systems
remained the same whichever system he occupied, and that the laws of mechanics were
satisfied in either case. But electromagnetic relativity exhibits results within our
system which compel us to have recourse to the other system with its space-time
structure in order to account for them. Under Newtonian relativity sociality was confined
to thought. Given the two systems moving with reference to each other, the conditions of
either will forever remain the same, uninfluenced by the motion or rest of the other.
Under electro-

(63) -magnetic relativity the mass of the moving object increases in the system at
rest, and this involves the different spatial and temporal coefficients of the other
system. It is this break in what I have called the correlations between differences of
space and time in different systems which reveals in the perceptual world that sociality
in nature which has been generally confined to thought. The increased mass in the system
at rest must also coincidentally be moving according to its own clock and in a space
measured by its own yardstick, in order that there may be an increase in its mass within
the other system. We have already seen that there is sociality in nature in so far as the
emergence of novelty requires that objects be at once both in the old system and in that
which arises with the new. Relativity reveals a situation within which the object must be
contemporaneously in different systems to be what it is in either. The experimental proofs
of relativity all come back to such situations.

I have pointed out that this is no novelty in science, though it has always implied an
unsolved problem. We find it in teleology in biology and in consciousness in psychology.
The animal species is in the mechanical system determined both by past conditions and also
by tendencies to maintain itself in the future. The conduct of the conscious organism is
determined both by a physiological system from behind and also by a consciousness which
reaches into the future. This can of course take place only in a present in which both the
conditioning past and the emergent future are to be found; but, as these problems
indicate, what is further called for is the recognition that in the present the location
of the object in one system places it in the others as well. It is this which I have
called the sociality of the present. If we examine the situation from the standpoint of
relativity, we see that the very motion that is taking place within the system at rest
carries with it a different spatio-

(64) -temporal structure, which is responsible for an increase of mass within the
system at rest. If we translate this into the other two situations, we see a biochemical
process arising which we call life, but which so changes the conditions under which it
goes on that there arises in nature its environment; and we see living forms selecting
those past conditions which lead to future maintenance of life and thus introducing values
and later meanings into nature.

If we ask for the past that conditions the emergence of the present we can find no
other formulation for it than this, that whatever emerges must be subject to the
conditioning character of the present, and that it must be possible to state the emergent
in terms of the conditioning past. In Newtonian relativity, in the case of unaccelerated
motion of two systems with reference to each other, the conditioning past was summed up in
the dictum of the same relative position of the bodies of the two systems and the same
mechanical situation whichever system was regarded as in motion. In this situation there
is no emergence. If into this Newtonian relativity we now introduce the Special Principle
of relativity we have the emergence of new characters of the moving body in the system
within which it moves, because of its motion. And if we describe the body under the old
conditions we must reduce it to rest, which only can occur without loss of the reality
which the emergent motion brings with it if we set in motion the other system with the
emergent changes appearing in that system. In the case of General Relativity, Einstein
undertook the task of formulating the universal conditions under which the changes in the
spatio-temporal structure of the universe seem to take place -those changes which are due
to motion, accelerated as well as unaccelerated. He has shown that these are also
conditions for changes in mass, and is at work upon the task of showing that the same is
true for electromagnetism.

Now the principle of sociality that I am attempting to enunciate is that in the present
within which emergent change takes place the emergent object belongs to different systems
in its passage from the old to the new because of its systematic relationship with other
structures, and possesses the characters it has because of its membership in these
different systems. While this principle has been evidenced most clearly in the doctrine of
relativity as applied to physical theory, it is here least evident for our experience
because the changes in mass, for example, due to the velocities with which we are familiar
are so minute that the changes in Newton's law lie in the field of distant decimals. On
the other hand electro-magnetic relativity has succeeded in presenting the form of the
emergent with great exactness. We know the type of changes that will take place if any
velocity appears within a certain system. Here we deal simply with the relation of the
structures of space and time to motion. If we turn to the other two examples of sociality
I have adduced-that of life and that of consciousness -- we find ourselves in highly
complex situations that are but dimly comprehended. We find that what understanding we
have of life involves a reference to the future in the maintenance of the form and of the
species. We know the life process is a physico-chemical process, but what the exact
character of the process is we do not know as we know the character of a velocity. We do
know, however, that the life processes are not confined to the organism, but taken as
wholes include interactions between the organism and its surroundings, and we call that
surrounding world, in so far as it is involved in these processes, the environment of the
form and its species. That is, we recognize that emergent life changes the character of
the world just as emergent velocities change the character of masses. And we know that
what we call conscious processes are physiolog-

(66) -ical processes, and that those processes which we generally call behavior utilize
their organized adjustments in order to select the objects to which they respond, and that
as a result of this behavior things within the environment of these living conscious forms
take on values and meanings. We know that conscious processes are dependent upon a high
development of an encephalon which is the outgrowth of the nervous mechanism of distance
stimulation and of the delayed responses which distant stimuli make possible. The whole of
such a nervous system provides both the field and the mechanism for selection with
reference to distant futures, and this selection endows surrounding objects with the
values and meanings which this future subtends. But what the physiological process is
which puts at the disposal of the individual organism its highly organized responses for
the purposes of discrimination and selection no one knows. There is, however, a great
contrast between application of the principle of sociality in these different fields. In
the field of physical relativity we know the process of motion with great exactness, but
there are but three or four recondite experiments in which we can bring into our
experience the effects which velocities have in changing the characters of things. On the
other hand, the effects that result from living and conscious processes are evident on
every side, while the nature of the processes has hitherto been shrouded in impenetrable
obscurity. But in all three of these fields the principle of sociality nevertheless
obtains. In all three there is emergence, and the character of this emergence is due to
the presence in different systems of the same object or group of objects. Thus we find
that in one system with certain space, time and energy characters, an object moving with a
high velocity has an increased mass because it is characterized by different space, time
and energy coefficients, and the whole physical system is thereby affected. In like

(67) manner, it is because an animal is both alive and a part of a physico-chemical
world that life is an emergent and extends its influence to the environment about it. It
is because the conscious individual is both an animal and is also able to look before and
after that consciousness emerges with the meanings and values with which it informs the
world.

Notes

Eddington, "Space, Time, and Gravitation," page 22 ff. For a more balanced
account of the relativist theory the reader may consult A. Metz, "Temps, Espace,
Relativité."

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